Firing a title-winning coach one week before the playoffs? Par for the course in NBA season of crazy decisions

The Nuggets' firing of Malone is the latest head-scratching decision the NBA has seen recently

The Denver Nuggets fired coach Michael Malone and general manager Calvin Booth on Tuesday, less than a week away from the start of a playoff run. For the timing alone, this would qualify as the craziest decision of any normal NBA season. This has been anything but a normal season. 

The madness started when the Mavericks traded Luka Dončić just after midnight on Feb. 1. To the Lakers. For Anthony Davis. Who then immediately went down with an injury. And that was followed by Kyrie Irving tearing his ACL. 

Nothing was going to top the Dončić deal, and frankly, there's a good chance nothing ever will. It could very well be the dumbest and most perplexing decision you see a major sports franchise make for as long as you live. 

It was all we talked about for about weeks, and then we moved on. We shouldn't have. We should still be talking about this trade, but people get bored and need new drama. The Grizzlies stepped up in this time of need by canning coach Taylor Jenkins completely out of nowhere at the end of last month.

The Nuggets are wasting Nikola Jokić's prime, and they're running out of time to fix it

Sam Quinn

Sure, there were reasons, scapegoat-seeking as they were, if you wanted to go looking. The Grizzlies -- despite holding the West's No. 5 seed at the time of the firing -- had lost 12 of their previous 20 games at the time of the firing, Ja Morant wasn't responding as well as one might hope to an offensive change that took the ball out of his hands, and their record against teams with records above .500 was not the reflection of a true contender. 

It wouldn't take much to argue the opposite, that Jenkins actually did a good job holding the Grizzlies together through a bunch of injuries and player absences that were ultimately the culprit of Memphis' fall from a darling, young contender on the rise. 

Morant played nine games last season. He's missed 31 more this season. The replacing of Dillon Brooks with Marcus Smart was supposed to be a defensive swap without all the headaches, but Smart played just 39 games over two seasons. Brandon Clarke missed all but six games last season with a torn Achilles, and now he's out for the rest of this season with a sprained PCL. 

But all of this aside, it was the timing of the Jenkins firing -- two weeks out from the playoffs --  that was the real shocker. Same goes for Malone. It's worth repeating there were six days left in the regular season when this went down. Six. 

The idea that an assistant coach, David Adelman, son of longtime NBA head coach Rick Adelman, is going to slide one chair over on the bench and fundamentally alter Denver's playoff prospects at this stage of the game is beyond desperate. It's delusional. 

I'm happy to go on record saying if the Nuggets make a real playoff run this season, it won't be because they fired Malone and it won't be because they swapped in Adelman. It'll be because they have Nikola Jokić, who quietly has been covering for the mistakes of this franchise for years and can do it again. 

Hiring Malone was not one of those mistakes. And keeping the core together for years until it bloomed into a championship also was not a mistake, even if Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr. look overpaid on paper. It requires context to assess the Murray extension; Booth reportedly looked into trading him but ultimately he wouldn't have had any trade value if he wasn't locked up on a deal. There was no alternative to Porter given salary-cap constraints.

Fine print aside, the end result of these guys all staying put, Malone included, and growing together and having the chance to continue doing so in the aftermath of a title is, or was, actually a signal to other teams to embrace cohesion instead of musical-chairing your roster and bench. 

This remains a good team that has been coached well in context, even if you disagree with Malone's preference to prioritize veterans over youth development, as Booth reportedly did. Is everyone too old to remember that firing the coach almost never works? That changing coaches is typically a non-action disguised as action? 

There are exceptions, sure. The Warriors fired Mark Jackson and won 16 more games and a title with Steve Kerr, with largely the same roster, the very next season. The 2016 Cavs fired David Blatt, hired Ty Lue and won the title. The Raptors dumped Coach of the Year Dwane Casey and won a title with Nick Nurse, but they added Kawhi Leonard. The Hawks fired Lloyd Pierce in the middle of the 2020-21 season and wound up making a surprise run to the conference finals with Nate McMillan, but history immediately proved that short-term outcome to be more of a circumstantially friendly fluke than the product of a new coach. Atlanta hasn't been past the first round since, and McMillan has long since been fired himself. Quin Snyder isn't faring any better. 

The list goes on. The Suns made the 2021 Finals, then fired Monty Williams and have been a mess since. The Bucks won the 2021 title, against those Suns, then promptly fired Mike Budenholzer and ... have been a mess since. The Lakers fired Frank Vogel after winning the 2020 title, and haven't been back since. It's fair to say the Lakers made a good decision by replacing Darvin Ham with J.J. Redick no matter how this season turns out; he looks like that good of a fit. But Ham took that team to the conference finals and we'll see if Redick can do the same, let alone more. 

Nuggets fire Michael Malone: How did Denver get here? Malone's own words paint picture of team dysfunction

James Herbert

These are all nothing more than ownership groups, and by extension front offices, that couldn't handle a little bit of struggle and went searching for bailouts. Malone should've been different. If the Nuggets' ownership could no longer handle the heat of a little bit of struggle -- and I emphasize a little bit; this team was fighting for the No. 2 seed in a loaded conference for most of the season -- then the least they owed to Malone for delivering the only championship in franchise history was a good ol' offseason divorce. 

The Booth firing actually makes more sense, even from, or perhaps especially from, the timing standpoint. This is the crazy season for GMs with the draft approaching and the need to tie draft decisions to overall summer plans in terms of free agency and potential trades. It's never ideal for a new GM to have to start his or her tenure with the decisions of the outgoing one. At least let them determine as much of their own fate as possible. 

Plus, Booth didn't exactly work any miracles for the Nuggets. If anything, he kind of wasted the one miracle the franchise did benefit from in the second-round drafting of Jokić, for which the Nuggets can thank Tim Connelly. They let him go to the Timberwolves, whom he then took from the bowels of the NBA to the conference finals. Everything that won the Nuggets that 2023 championship, from the drafting of Jokić and Murray and Porter to the trade for Aaron Gordon and, yes, the hiring of Malone, was put in place by Connelly. 

Yes, Booth added some key parts in Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Bruce Brown that put the Nuggets over the top in their long and patient championship chase, but he then immediately let them go and Denver's depth, or lack thereof, has been its Achilles heel since. 

It's not too much unlike what Rob Pelinka did with the Lakers. He also let key support parts of the Lakers' 2020 championship team walk like Alex Caruso and Dwight Howard. One of them was literally the same guy, Caldwell-Pope, and Russell Westbrook was also a Pelinka prayer, just as he was for Booth. Literally down to two of the same exact players, Booth and Pelinka did similarly sad work on the back end of a title. The only difference is Nico Harrison didn't invite Booth for a coffee and proceed to offer him Dončić for the rest of his croissant. 

Now, Booth was likely being told what to do by the Nuggets' owners in terms of cost-cutting around the edges, so let's not let Josh Kroenke off the hook. But at the end of the day, the point is this: However you want to dole out blame for the oh-so catastrophic failure of being a top-four seed for most of the season in a murderous Western Conference, Malone wasn't the problem. At least not to a degree that warrants firing him with six days to go in a season that still has legitimate hope. 

But hey, it's 2025. The year of crazy in the NBA. Who knows what will happen between now and Sunday.